Samuel Proulx

Blind geek, fanfiction lover (Harry Potter and MLP). Mastodon at: @fastfinge@equestria.social.

  • 42 Posts
  • 245 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • From the article:

    The TLS-SNI header is used by CDN servers to route requests based on the Server Name in the header. However, a typical front end server, or even a load balancer (LB), belongs to a single app or organization, and does not typically need to handle the SNI header. The easy and reasonable way to configure TLS certificates on such a server, is to either:
 Serve all requests with a single TLS certificate that has SANs (Subject Alternative Names) for all the domains that are used Have multiple certificates, chosen according to SNI, with one of them as the default. In both of these common cases, sending a HTTPS request directly to the IP of a front end server, without any SNI, will present us with a default server certificate. This certificate will reveal what domains are being served by this server.

    So apparently the real issue is that people aren’t using SNI correctly.



  • Start with the first two episodes of season 1; you need them for worldbuilding. Strange to say about a show like this, I know! But it’s true. If I were you, I might consider skipping to Dragonshy; it was my favourite episode in s1. Then maybe Winter Wrap-up, Call of The Cutie, and Look Before You Sleep. If you’re loving the show, then just watch it all! But if you didn’t find anything to like in those episodes, give up. MLP isn’t for you.








  • We had some hosting problems back in September. However, we have that resolved, we’ve vastly improved the reliability of email delivery, and in more exciting news, we have a designer working on a more accessible custom theme that we intend to contribute to the Lemmy community overall as well as make our default. It’s taken us a while, but better email deliverability and a custom theme were the two things on our list we felt we needed before we could start actively promoting the instance. This post was one of the steps in preparing for that promotional work.







  • Yes and no. I left during the API drama and the blackout. First, moving communities wholesale just never works. Community archives don’t migrate, the affordances are different from site to site, etc. That’s why we (speaking for all the folks who run the ourblind.com set of communities) run a Reddit, a Discord, and of course the rblind.com Lemmy. The members and culture are wildly different between the three. And that’s fine. Though because of moderation issues, these days all posts to /r/blind need approval, and sometimes approval can take a day or more. However, Reddit’s decision to exempt the accessibility focused clients (Luna and Dystopia) that most blind folks use meant that a lot of blind people preferred to stay on Reddit, especially those who just consume content from other communities.

    Second, creating a home for a new community, and doing it properly, takes a lot of time and effort! It’s taken us over a year to get the server infrastructure for rblind.com to a place I’m happy with. We had almost a week of downtime a while back, and until recently email delivery was extremely dodgy. While those things are fixed now, we’re still in process of creating a custom (more accessible) theme for our Lemmy. So even over a year later, I would still consider the rblind.com Lemmy to be in an alpha state. Signups are more than welcome, but we’re not actively working to push people over from elsewhere. Despite that, we’ve got a couple active daily users (mostly in off-site communities), folks make regular posts to our main community from Mastodon, and we’ve got a couple hundred registered users. It took the Reddit about five years to really take off, and even the Discord took a couple years before it started popping. So I’m happy for Lemmy to slowly build at its own pace, into whatever it decides to become, without trying to make it a clone of Reddit or something else, or forcing the existing communities to move over.

    As well, of course, if Reddit does decide to cut off the accessible clients, or do something else that makes it completely screen reader inaccessible, our Lemmy means that no single service can hold our community hostage. Unlike when the API stuff happened, now we wouldn’t be in the position of racing to find a new home. We’ve got somewhere that’s mostly built and ready for people to move in when they need it.


  • Proof of work is pretty good. Also, email and phone number verification can reduce the need for this type of verification at all. Similarly, punting the problem to someone else and allowing login via Apple/Facebook/other open ID provider can help. Apple also has a system for verifying that a request comes from a real apple device that services like cloudflare use. But if you have to do it yourself, the key is offering a visual captcha, an audio captcha, and a text-based captcha. Also, try to maintain a trust score for both accounts and IP addresses. Captchas have to made so difficult today to keep out the bots that you need to make sure your users only have to solve them once. As well, if I know the captcha will only happen once, while it’s not ideal, I could request help with it. But if the captcha is on every login, or once a day or whatever, I can’t. Between proof of work, rate limiting, and email verification, and trust scores, 99 percent of captchas aren’t needed and aren’t doing anything. So the first step is understanding the problem you’re trying to solve, and determining if a captcha is the best way to solve it at all. It probably isn’t.